Metonymy

the partiality of the object has the closest possible relationship with what I have called the function of metonymy which lends itself in grammar to the same equivocations... this part taken for the whole in the operation is transformed: it becomes its signifier

Lacan argues that the partial object of desire is structurally identical to metonymy's rhetorical operation, wherein a part stands for a whole and, in so doing, becomes the signifier of that whole rather than merely indexing it.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage, seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding

Citing Nietzsche, Derrida presents metonymy as co-equal with metaphor in constituting 'truth' itself — truth being nothing more than worn, forgotten tropes, dismantling the concept/trope hierarchy.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis

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What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relatio

Ricoeur repeats Nietzsche's triad — metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms — in the context of the shattered cogito, situating metonymy within the broader Nietzschean critique of truth as rhetorical fabrication.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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As soon as one retains only a predicate of the circle (for example, return to the point of departure, closing of the circuit), its signification is put into the position of a trope, of metonymy if not metaphor.

Derrida demonstrates that scientific 'rectification' of metaphor does not escape tropology but merely substitutes one trope for another, with metonymy emerging as the figure of partial predicate retention.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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Ce que cette structure de la chaine signifiante découvre, c'est la possibilité que j'ai, justement dans la mesure ou sa langue m'est commune avec d'autres sujets... de m'en servir pour signifier tout autre chose que ce quelle dit.

Lacan's account of the signifying chain — the structural basis for both metonymy and metaphor — shows that language's shared nature enables the subject to mean something other than what is said, the condition of metonymic displacement.

Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, 1966supporting

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The transported significations are those of attributed properties, not those of essence itself... metaphor can manifest properties, can relate properties extracted from the essence of different things to each other

Derrida's analysis of Aristotelian metaphor — transporting properties rather than essences — provides the philosophical ground against which metonymy's contiguous, part-for-whole logic is implicitly differentiated.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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Analogy is metaphor par excellence... Of the four kinds of metaphor, the most taking is the metaphor by analogy (kat' analogian)

Derrida's explication of Aristotle's four-fold metaphor taxonomy — with analogy supreme — establishes the classical rhetorical hierarchy within which metonymy's contiguity-based logic must be located.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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the usual function of metaphor is a wish to designate a particular aspect of a thing or to describe something for which words are not available... We operate upon this by some similar, more familiar thing, called a metaphier.

Jaynes's account of metaphor as designation of a 'particular aspect' of a thing gestures toward metonymic part-for-whole logic without naming it, illustrating the conceptual proximity between the two tropes in cognitive theories of mind-space.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside

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To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor

Carson's citation of Aristotle's metaphora as transfer from kin or similar things establishes the classical backdrop against which metonymy's transfer-by-contiguity is implicitly contrasted.

Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986aside

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